It has been a while since we saw the first factual proof of the existence of Fiji, the next generation flagship AMD GPU, that will be the first graphics card to come with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) memory.

Shortly after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in early January, we heard that Oculus has the latest AMD hardware and a few weeks ago Tom's Hardware confirmed it. The publication saw a demonstration of "Showdown running on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay, being powered by an unannounced Radeon R9 flagship ultra-enthusiast product."

The HTC / Valve Rift demo at the Mobile World Congress 2015 was carried out with Geforce GTX 980 cards. Our sources informed us that HTC and Valve have a Fiji-powered demo too, but they didn’t want to show it. As you can imagine, there is a Titan X version of this setup too.

Dual GPU hints dropped along the way

However, AMD raised our suspicions about the Fiji design when they announced LiquidVR SDK, where they clearly stated that you need two GPUs. The slide below clearly implies that you need Affinity multi-GPU rendering in order to reduce latency and increase content quality.

"Affinity Multi-GPU for scalable rendering, a technology that allows multiple GPUs to work together to improve frame rates in VR applications by allowing them to assign work to run on specific GPUs. Each GPU renders the viewpoint from one eye, and then composites the outputs into a single stereo 3D image. With this technology, multi-GPU configurations become ideal for high performance VR rendering, delivering high frame rates for a smoother experience. "

This is how AMD ended up with 8GB of HBM1 memory

So, when Fudzilla wrote that Fiji is going to ship with 8GB of RAM, we didn’t actually think that we were talking about two separate GPUs, on separate interposers, with each GPU using 4GB of HBM1 memory. This is how AMD got to 8GB, or should we say two times 4GB for this card. It makes much more sense now, and of course we would not be surprised to see Fiji for notebooks and lower-end desktop products in a single GPU configuration.

AMD is betting big on Virtual Reality (VR), and we have been aware of this since late 2014. The company knows that Nvidia is putting a lot of effort into VR research and development, so AMD wants to try to beat Nvidia in this new emerging market.

Competition heating up in VR segment

Since there are at least two big players coming this year with their retail products, Facebook owned Oculus and Valve / HTC, both Nvidia and AMD want to end up selling more of their GPUs for these kits.

We tried Crescent Bay last week and we have to admit that the latest VR glasses by Oculus are better than the Developer Kit 2, popularly known as DK2. We tried Oculus DK2 back in September 2014 and again in January 2015 at CES, but it made us feel dizzy, and overall graphics quality was quite poor despite running on high-end Nvidia hardware. It was all about the quality of glasses, leness and technology that Oculus used.

Crescent Bay makes you less dizzy, the picture quality is better, but we are not sure if we would be comfortable to wear that for more than few minutes, because we simply didn't have enough time to try it. We still didn’t have a chance to try the Valve / HTC virtual reality kit, but many of our distinguished colleagues have and they all claim that it is better than Oculus Crescent Bay.

Oh, one more thing – AMD is already working hard on a next generation High Bandwidth Memory HBM card that is smaller than 20nm. We still don't know which node it will use, or which type of memory (HBM1 or HBM2).

Following the successful launch of the R9 290X Vapor-X 8GB graphics card, Sapphire has decided to introduce yet another Radeon R9 290X graphics card with 8GB of video memory, lower clocks, and a Tri-X triple-fan cooler.

Based on the well known 28nm Hawaii XT GPU GCN 1.1 architecture with 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 512-bit memory interface, the R9 290X has been AMD's high-end backbone for quite some time and it is no wonder that Sapphire has decided to spice up the offer with a new model featuring 8GB of GDDR5 memory as well as its custom Tri-X triple-fan cooler.

Based on a custom PCB with 6-phase VRM powered by two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, Sapphire's new R9 290X Tri-X 8GB works at a 1020MHz GPU clock while, the GDDR5 memory ended up clocked at 5.5GHz. The most important feature of the new R9 290X Tri-X 8GB graphics card is the Tri-X triple-fan cooler that features a total of five heatpipes, with a central 10mm heatpipe, connected to a hefty heatsink and cooled by three 85mm fans.

Microsoft has announced that Halo 4’s multiplayer has components on the second disc included in the Halo 4 package will have to be installed in order to be played. The data on disc 2 for the multiplayer will require 8GB of storage. This means it will not work on Xbox 360 4GB systems without additional storage.

The additional storage can come in the form of a hard drive, of course, or a USB flash drive up to 16GB that is compatible with the system. With the low cost of compatible 16GB USB flash drives these days, it really should not be that big of a deal. In the case of Xbox 360 owners who have the non-slim version of the console, used hard drives in sizes from 20GB to 250GB are in abundance at all price points.

According to Microsoft, the “extensive suite of multiplayer features” made the installation necessary, but it should not create that much of a hardship to Xbox 360 4GB console owners wanting to play Halo 4 in multiplayer mode, given the lower costs associated with USB flash drives or used hard drives. In fact, the numbers of users that don’t have additional storage is likely to be fewer than one might think.

This is not the first time that we have seen additional content required to be loaded on a USB Flash Drive or the hard drive to get the most out of a game. By today’s standards, the 8GB of storage on an Xbox 360 disc is small compared to the 50GB offered by the Blu-ray on the PlayStation 3, or the 25GB offered by the upcoming Wii U. However, Microsoft has already addressed the situation once by maximizing the space that developers have to use on the disc when they introduced the new disc format in one of the previous updates. We are doubtful that the news will move the meter much, as users will be willing to buy a flash drive or a used drive in order to play Halo 4 in multiplayer.

With leaks and rumors of Apple’s iPad Mini aplenty ahead of launch, it has come to our attention that German retailer Media Markt has as much as 16 versions of the device in inventory.

Many punters believed Apple would price the entry level model at 299 dollars/euros, but the inventory listing shows the entry level wi-fi only 8GB model for €249. There are a total of 16 SKUs in black and white, with 8, 16, 32 and 64GB of storage. The 16GB version is priced at €349, and the 32GB and 64GB versions cost €449 and €549, so no surprises there, the usual €100 bump for extra storage.

The same goes for cellular versions, they cost €100 more than wi-fi only SKUs, so the cheapest data enabled iPad mini costs €349 with 8GB of storage. However, we reckon most consumers will go for the cheaper wi-fi only models rather than high-end cellular SKUs priced at €500+.

In related news, 9to5mac claims that the iPad Mini will not be the only new device at its own launch, as the company is set to roll out a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. The MacBook should also come with a thinner and lighter enclosure and, as usual, higher price, but we'll see soon enough.

Corsair has launched two new 8GB DDR3 modules that will be a part of its Value Select and Vengeance series.

The Value Select 8GB DDR3 module will work at 1333MHz with 9-9-9-24 latencies at 1.5V, while the 8GB Vengeance one will be a bit faster at 1600MHz with 10-10-10-27 latencies at the same 1.5V. Both modules are backed by a lifetime warranty. Giovanni Sena, Director of Memory Products at Corsair noted that these 8GB modules will allow system integrators as well as gaming enthusiasts to easily break the 16GB barrier.

Unfortunately, the price of both modules haven't been announced but Newegg.com is listing the 8GB Vengeance one at US $269.99. The 8GB modules are quite rare and although there are some currently available on the market, Corsair's 8GB Vengeance is the first one that has broken the 1333MHz barrier.

Toshiba is hitting the Berlin IFA 2011 pretty hard and one of the first things that caught attention is Toshiba's competitor to the Eye-Fi family, a FlashAir SD card with 8GB worth of SDHC flash room with a dash of 802.11bgn WiFi connectivity.

The new FlashAir card features Class 6 speed rating, which means that you can expect up to 6MB/s of transfer speed. The rest of the specs are pretty standard for any SD card except for the obvious 802.11bgn WiFi part.

The new 8GB FlashAir SDHC card should start sampling in November while Toshiba expects it to show up on retail/e-tail shelves sometime in February 2012.

Sources have confirmed that what we already told you is now fact. Nintendo will pass on adding a hard drive to the Wii2 and instead go with an 8GB flash storage drive. Expansion will be possible using SD cards, from what we have been told.

The decision not to include a hard drive apparently has more to do with durability and cost than anything else, according to a lurker from the shadows. This shadow dweller, however, claims that Nintendo has not closed the book entirely on the possibility of a hard drive add-on down the road. They might have no other choice than to offer it, as 8GB isn’t going to get it and users are not going to put up with swapping SD cards. So, at least at launch there will be no hard drive, just don’t say never.

The optical disc unit, we are told, will be a unique unit that is not expected be a Blu-ray compatible unit. Instead, it will be a CD/DVD combo drive that is able to read a special 25GB single sided optical disc. We are told that the actual disc format is similar in some ways to the old HD DVD format, but it uses a unique structure for the Wii2 titles. At least right now there is no word of Nintendo offering HD movies in this format, and we believe that this will never happen.

As for our take, we think the choice of only 8GB of flash storage is too shortsighted by the company, unless they are going to offer a hard drive or large flash storage upgrade option at a later time. If Nintendo wants the console to be a serious console that will attract developers to port the “A” titles over to this console, as well, they are going to need more storage. For example, many of the latest add-on download packs on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 check in at almost 1GB. It isn’t going to take but a few of these before the 8GB is full; and as we said, users are not going to put up with swapping SD cards.

As for the 25GB optical format, we are surprised that Nintendo would elect to do something unique, rather than adopting the Blu-ray standard and using a Blu-ray drive in the Wii2. While the price of Blu-ray drives continues to tumble, we don’t see the same for a proprietary drive; but drive and format will be unique and that will reduce the piracy potential of the unit.

In the end, we find Nintendo’s decisions surprising and we believe that anything less than 16GB (really 32GB if you want to know the truth) just does not make sense. We like the idea of a flash memory storage solution, but at 8GB it just isn’t big enough, unless Nintendo has an add-on plan for the future.

Super Talent Technology has released two new Express DUO USB 3.0 flash drives that certainly redefine the word cheap as these two will be available with a price tag set at US $14 for the 8GB version and US $29 for the 16GB one.

The new Express DUO drives feature a USB 3.0 interface and provide transfer speeds of up to 67MB/s for read and 23MB/s for write. As noted, both drives feature USB 3.0 and are backward compatible with the USB 2.0.

The new Express Duo flash drives are scheduled to show up in November and at that price range are simply a steal.